LLVM Weekly - #96, Nov 2nd 2015

Welcome to the ninety-sixth issue of LLVM Weekly, a weekly newsletter
(published every Monday) covering developments in LLVM, Clang, and related
projects. LLVM Weekly is brought to you by Alex
Bradbury. Subscribe to future issues at
http://llvmweekly.org and pass it on to anyone else you think may be
interested. Please send any tips or feedback to asb@asbradbury.org, or @llvmweekly or @asbradbury on Twitter.

Timothy Jones has written a blog post about throttled
SLP and how
counter-intuitively you can boost performance by limiting vectorisation. This
was developed with Vasileios Porpodas who presented the
paper at PACT
and talked about it at last week's LLVM dev meeting.

Portable Computing Language (pocl) v0.12 has been
released.
pocl aims to be an open-source, performance portable implementation of the
OpenCL standard. This release includes support for HSA-compliant devices and
is the last one that will build with older LLVM versions.

LLVM commits

An improvement to codegen for ARM/ELF for global variable addresses means
that Chromium for Android builds are now 4% smaller.
r251322.

Support for the Apple WatchOS ABI and its compact unwind information has
landed. r251570,
r251573.

LLVM's bitcode format can now include an identification block. This contains
a string that can be used to give information on the bitcode producer as well
as an 'epoch' number, intended to increase monotonically as incompatible
changes to the bitcode are made. This should allow for more user-friendly
error messages upon attempting to read incompatible bitcode.
r251325.

Experimental C bindings for the Orc JIT compilation API have been added.
r251472.

The 'interrupt' attribute on functions is now supported for mips32r2+.
r251286.

AARch64LoadStoreOptimizer learned to merge two halfword loads into a single
32-bit load. r251438.